Episode Ninety Four

0:00welcome to smith and mark's walk into a bar a history of economics podcast i'm jennifer john one of your hosts and i'm joined here by a very full house first my fellow host cinla akter hi cinla welcome back good to see you hello everybody i'm so happy to uh kick off uh the podcast today and of this semester i'm so happy to have you here again see you and

0:37this is the beginning of the semester in ankara it's the second week of the classes well how are you you jen i'm doing good um i'm on leave this year well unofficially i'm on leave this year so i'm spending a lot of my time doing research and that's very very nice so i can't complain

0:58so but welcome back we're really happy to see you again and i'm also going to say hello to francois alisson hi francois i like your shirt for our audience francois wearing a lovely shirt today it's got flowers or stars on it or something flowers flowers it's lovely thank you jennifer i'm very happy to be here um third week of the semester here in lausanne and i'm so happy to and so excited to see so many new faces in the show yes so welcome so the reason why we have a full house today is today

1:30is our young scholars early career scholars episode uh where we bring in a few people who are juniors in the profession and we think they're doing interesting work and we want them to come on by and tell us about what they're up to and about who they are uh the three that i have here today are actually visiting us at the at the history for the political history of political economy center at duke as visiting scholars and they are eva jacob hey eva hi i have rafael orange leroy orange leroy

2:06hello thank you thank you for the invitation and very happy to be with you today thank you for being here and benjamin bryson hi thank you for having me as well so two-thirds of our show is in durham north carolina at the moment we've got a bunch of questions we want to ask you and get to know you a little bit better so i will just start things off by asking you to introduce yourselves tell us a little bit about who you are where you went to school um at least a couple of your very recent phd uh recipients congratulations um what you studied what your dissertation was on and

2:44where are you kind of now in terms of your work and let's start off with eva yes thank you so much so yeah actually i recently completed my phd in economics like in june um so i did my undergraduate study at the university of strasbourg in france and then i spent a year at macquarie university in sydney australia for my first year of master's degree then i came back to strasbourg during the coveted period to finish my master's degree in macroeconomics and european policy analysis and

3:21alongside that i also completed uh what you call what we call in france magister de genie economy which is a selective three-year program research oriented so then i pursued my phd still at the university of strasbourg where i also taught several courses included microeconomics macroeconomics statistics game theory as well and my phd dissertation was entitled unconditional basic income challenged by

3:55social justice uh historic concept and experiment so through a study of the literature on basic income i identified three main limits related to social justice and i analyzed this limit through three complementary approaches so history of economic thought economic philosophy and experimental economics so the first tension that uh i studied uh that i studied sorry uh concerned the conceptual complexity of

4:30basic income uh which takes different form uh across history for instance we have uh friedman negative income tax we have also uh minimum guarantee income schemes all of which that are part of a broader uh basic income debate the second limit that i also studied in my thesis uh lies in john roll's famous malibus of critics of philly van paris who philly van paris developed a theory of justice based on basic income

5:02and who was the the main author i studied in my thesis um so i examined whether one paris framework can in theory and in practice respond to words objection and so i used both uh history of economic thought and experimental data and i concluded that without a clear funding mechanism uh neither theory nor practice can definitely assess the effects of basic income uh on labor supply and finally uh the last limit i studied

5:34was the accident acceptability actually of basic income uh particularly whether van paris maximing criterion aligns with individual preferences so for that i did a laboratory experiment with my two supervisors and we showed that individuals with a maximum in preferences tended to favor a basic income scheme which suggested that such a policy can indeed be justified on a maximum goal and so as you said currently i'm a postdoctoral visiting scholar at the hope center at duke university but i'm also on

6:09the job market for the next academic year and at duke just to tell you quickly what i'm doing i'm expanding actually one aspect of my dissertation that is the lack of funding mechanism for unconditional system and for that i'm studying the work and the archives of antony atkinson who explored taxation redistribution and unconditional benefits awesome thank you for joining us today i'm really glad that you that you're here we also have rafael with us rafael would you tell us a little bit about yourself you

6:45are like ava i think you're just recently out of grad school yes and tell us a little bit about where you went to school and what field that your your work was in maybe a little bit about your dissertation and what you're working on now thank you thank you very much so um i am not exactly a historian of economic thought i am rather a historian of international economic relations so it is a very interdisciplinary specialty which has no dedicating training path on my end i studied philosophy and

7:19history at sorbonne university and i began working on economic history during my master's degree and recently in december i graduated with a phd in history at sergey paris university and in joint supervision with university paris 1 ponton sorbonne my dissertation was entitled the my dissertation was a manuscript like in history rather than articles and it was entitled the other side of the coin global south unctad and the imf in the renegotiations of the britainwood system

7:57between 1961 and 1976 in in a few in a few words it was about north south international financial and monetary negotiations through international organizations i showed that a coalition of developing countries used the united nations to influence the imf and reshape its policies during the 60s and the 70s before before basically the neoliberal turn at the 70s and the 80s oh so my phd is in history

8:32i mostly teach in history but this work is really at the crossroad with international relations economic history and the history of economics right now i'm at the center to pursue my research from the perspective of economic expertise in international organizations and at the same time i am also looking for new job opportunities all right you heard it we've got two wonderful scholars up here so far looking for looking for work so um heads up we also have one more scholar that i'd like to introduce

9:07to you benjamin you're here uh also at the center and you also actually just finished your your graduate studies as well so congratulations to you to you too um who are you tell us a little bit about where you went to school and what you studied and if you've got any plans coming up and what you're working on right yeah thanks jen um and thanks for the congratulations i i guess i did finish uh in june as well so uh that's been a big relief and great to kind of move on in in my career so i'm very happy to be a

9:42visiting scholar at the uh history for center for the history of uh political economy um and uh doing archival research here a bit of my background is that uh i am a political theorist uh by trade and i got my phd um from the university of california irvine um in political science um and yeah so my dissertation uh is entitled uh road to serfdom path to barbarism uh common ground between the austrian and

10:21frankfurt school critiques of fascism and it's essentially uh an intellectual history of of these scholars in exile the austrian school of economics whom um i'm sure everyone knows and uh the frankfurt school of critical theory um and essentially both of these schools uh had to uh flee the rise of of nazi germany um and fascism at the time um in the 1930s uh and come to the united states um

10:56it kind of in the end and then both of them were involved in in the war efforts uh against uh germany at the time and uh trying to theorize and very interesting in different ways uh what was happening there um and uh and and what was happening in austria as well so uh so yeah that's a bit about my dissertation we can get into into more of it but essentially i'm i'm trying to uh turn that into a

11:26a book project um and i'm working on that at the center because uh the uh hayek papers are here um and so i'm hoping to look at the hayek papers and essentially there there's a very interesting relationship between these two schools uh there's been very little to no work um kind of comparing them or looking at them side by side in an intellectual history uh perspective and uh they seem so

12:00different uh that there's been basically nothing written on it and so i'm very curious i i've in my dissertation i found quite a bit of work um or i found quite a bit on the sort of theoretical overlap uh between the two and some of the historical overlap but in terms of actual correspondence or actual engagement between the two that's what i'm kind of trying to dig up uh in the archives and so uh i'll be doing that with the hayek papers at duke and then after um after being a visiting scholar

12:33here in april i'll be going to uh the frei universität um in berlin uh and doing some more archival research there um focusing a little bit more uh on the frankfurt school side um so yeah that's a little bit about me and uh and then obviously i will eventually uh i am on the job market for kind of a more full-time job um in academia fantastic thank you everyone and welcome to the show we have more

13:08questions for you francois got the next one so go ahead francois yes absolutely the this will be fascinating i'm sure because these three subjects are are quite uh exciting and here at smith's and mark's walk into a bar we are very interested to know how you first became interested in the history of economics so it's perhaps a personal question but what attracted you to the field let's start with afael this time yes thank you francois so almost a decade ago i was finishing my bachelor in history

13:46and i basically knew nothing on economic ideas and facts so as i wanted to understand public policies and international history i considered it it might become a problem at some point so i went to see dominic barjo who was a professor in economic history at sorbonne university and he assigned me the very difficult task to work on the history of the international monetary fund for my master's thesis it was an absolute nightmare at first but then i came to to understand to understand it more

14:21bit by bit and that this is when i discovered that developing countries were present in the archives of international monetary negotiations but almost absent from the historiography so that's why i decided to study north-south monetary negotiations for my dissertation and my interest in the story in the history of economics grew even stronger under the influence of my two supervisors because on the one hand yanjiro encouraged me to study the role played by economists in multilateral debates and this

14:58is how i found myself working on the ideas and political impact of people such as raoul prebich gameni korea richard khan taybor skitowski or indian economist ig patel and on the other hand olivier firetag guided me towards financial and monetary history so the combination of these two approaches resulted in me studying the experts the economists the diplomats the central bankers who defended the

15:31global south in the negotiations so to sum up the history of economics was very relevant for me to study international relations at the same time international relations allowed me to discover some understudied economists as well as to study new dimensions in the work of the famous ones so the interdisciplinary was in interdisciplinarity was very fruitful fruitful here thank you very much rafael it also shows the

16:05the impact of of teachers that might have on students to choose to choose to engage in a field um benjamin what is your story yeah so my my interest in the history of economics also came from a teacher so uh in my undergrad uh uh uh and my bachelor's at st lawrence university uh i took a class with uh uh steven horowitz who uh an austrian economist uh or in in the tradition of austrian economics and uh the

16:42class was on austrian economics and uh and i learned about uh f.a hayek and ludwig von mises um and many of these other figures uh in austrian school and uh the classes that i took with steve um uh it kind of inspired me to major in economics and so my my experience with the history of economics kind of comes from from that time in undergrad uh but then my training is actually in political theory

17:16uh and so i i actually i i don't i wouldn't consider myself a historian of economics so much uh as uh history of political economy and so i i i believe that the term uh political economy actually uh really works uh in terms of my research because as a political theorist i always find that uh politics and economics are so intertwined uh i also find that i'm studying a lot of figures uh including hayek who

17:52speak both to economics and to politics as fields uh and uh speak both to sort of scholarly audiences as well as public audiences and uh so yeah i i i guess that that's kind of i was interested in the history of economics through the sort of backdoor um and and i i'm just very excited to be at the hope center and and engaged uh more with with this discipline excellent thank you very much benjamin and and what's about

18:29you eva uh yes thank you for this question uh for me it wasn't from teachers despite the fact that my two supervisor so uh magali grammar who is a cleometrician and era digerstein uh with an historian of economic are in the field but when i started my phd i didn't plan at all to work on the history of economic thoughts and particularly in my case uh in the history of economic thoughts uh so actually it was more

19:01about two main events that led me to that direction so the first thing is that actually i have learned economics in a very applied way at the university of strasbourg during my studies and so initially my dissertation was supposed to focus on a large-scale basic income experiment in strasbourg i even worked with the strasbourg city hall for the first month of my phd uh to help design um the project of the

19:35basic income uh there so uh but the problem was that uh the project was cancelled because uh budget constraint uh so at that moment i had to rethink my research topic and so i think that was the first uh turning point and then the second one is the one that truly drew me into the history of economic thought and it came when i studied deeply philip van paris theory of basic income and particularly how

20:06is he justified its introduction so i was reading basic income the book he had co-written with janic van der bot in 2017 and like i found myself struggling to understand why the author presented several different justification for basic income and why the emphasis of waltzian perspective so of course i knew about the malibu surfer controversy but i realized i was missing the internal intellectual

20:36links the into intellectual journey behind it so that's when i understood that to make a sense of van paris theory i needed to go back to his earlier writing and trace his intellectual journey over time and so that process really sparked my interest into the history of economic thought and actually it was the part of my thesis that i enjoyed the most writing and after that i i continued to work on history of id and other things that know i'm here so yeah it was really insightful for me

21:11excellent i i now have an another question for all three of you um because you are now the three of you as as a as a court at duke as postdoc but you all did your phd in different places and i want to know how your experience of writing a phd dissertation was and especially was it for your lonely painful adventure or were you involved in a collective um experience maybe benjamin you can start

21:47yeah thank you so i i think i'm a maybe a bit of an oddity because i i i never got sick of writing about my dissertation topic i i felt like i should have by the end uh but i'm just uh endlessly fascinated by by the connections that i that i've uh been finding and so uh i i found it to be i mean at times a solitary experience because that's how writing or at least writing single authored uh work certainly is um but i also and certainly during during

22:19covid um that was that was more of an isolated experience but uh i i really um i'm really thankful for uh for uh my committee uh and all of the great conversations that that we had that kind of pushed my project further uh i feel like a dissertation is is always a collaborative uh project in that regard um and uh yeah so i i felt like i never got sick of it uh but i mean sometimes it was a bit of a lonely

22:53experience for sure um and uh yeah excellent thank you uh eva was it the same yeah so i i think of course writing a phd is like never an easy task and i think it's normal to sometimes feel a bit lonely a bit lonely especially like when you have this period where you have to write last part of your phd

23:23so yeah i think that's kind of a normal feeling but for me i i think i was quite lucky in the way that i i've been involved in a lot of collaborative experiences like for example as i told you i work with the city of strasbourg at the beginning of my phd with my two supervisors and so we were even invited to participate to political meetings and so it was really enriching really nice i also had the chance to be a visiting uh research scholar at the diw berlin in germany and there as well i had the

24:02the chance to collaborate with some researcher on the basic income pilot project in germany and i also co-authored two papers in my thesis uh one with a friend and a colleague that is uh kevin so he was the one that was the bibliometric expert and me i was the basic income expert so it was a really complementary work and we really enjoyed this collaboration and i also did the laboratory

24:34experiments um with my two supervisors um with my two supervisors so again a really great collaborative experience so it was really better to to write like that but overall i really think that i was really lucky because even though there were some moments where of course you feel lonely uh it was never long lasting and i had as well strong support from my boyfriend my friends my family um and my supervisor were really available really really nice so i think yeah i was lucky and more generally i think research

25:12is about collaboration you you meet people in conferences you you make friends you exchange id you debate so i think you never really feel alone alone that long excellent um and what about you rafael um well writing can be indeed quite painful and difficult but um on the one hand i i benefited from the support of my wife and my family on the other hand the writing was always fueled by the interactions

25:48with other scholars and by the participation in collective works so of course the moral and intellectual support of my supervisors was really central or to finish the manuscript to at the end when it becomes to to to be difficult to to continue writing uh despite the doubts and the and the tiredness but there have been also other people along the road who have been key and um i'm thinking about joanna bockman who super who supervised me in in 2021 during a fulbright research day at george mason university

26:23at that point i was absolutely stuck in my research because of the contradictions of the authors i was reading on development economics and also it was a very strange time when archives were closed because of covid but nightclubs in dc were open so at this time joanna introduced me to to specialists on latin america that were not much read in france such as christy saunton joseph love sarah bab and tanya armor for instance and the reading their work totally changed

26:58the way i understood the role played by latin american actors and thinkers so she basically allowed me to rebuild my approach by leaving aside a few a few a few approaches like dependency theory for instance but i would say that three other collective experiences changed my perspective because on the diplomatic side there were a couple of conferences in organized in london and leiden by scholars like eva maria mouchik and nishka soboshinska and alena omale

27:30were a key to my understanding of the global south influence on the world stage on the economic side michelle margaraz michael margaraz michael esposito with whom i work at the historical mission of the banque de france pushed me to increase my work on central banking and i am so thankful they did finally philippe fontaine and his team his research team were very kind to include me in their debates on the history of economics so even though the the dissertation writing was quite difficult and

28:03sometimes lonely the the collective interaction they have system systematically helped me to to sort everything out well thank you very much uh we have uh another question um thank you for all the explanation you've given until now um i wonder what are your ambitions for your career and what challenges do you expect to confront in trying to realize these goals um you can start by eva

28:36thank you so much for this question even though i have to admit that's the root of questions especially that i'm currently on the job market for the next year and facing some uncertainty right now but yeah my goal is clearly to stay in academia and ideally i want to find another postdoctoral position or maybe i could imagine a tunnel track position as an assistant professor um because i really enjoy research and teaching and i want to keep developing projects i combine both dimension but in term of

29:10research i'd like to continue exploring the connection between economic thought philosophy and experimental approaches so especially i would like to still continue working on topics related to justice and redistribution and i think this interdisciplinary approach allows me to address complex economic questions in a broader way but also the main challenge however is precisely what makes my profile interesting so my work is really multidisciplinary and that sometimes it makes it hard to fit nearly into

29:49one academic category i think so i'm aware that i may not appear as a specialist of a single method for example but i see that as a strength because it allows me to build some bridges between different fields and different methodologies so my ambition is to find an academic environment where this interdisciplinary approach is valued and where i can contribute to both research and teaching communities

30:21thank you very much now it's the turn of rafael rafael thank you um well let's say that we are in an ideal world where there are some academic positions out there and i get one well in this case i would like to do a few things i would like to publish my dissertations i dissertation i would like to pursue a new large research project on the history of development finance I would like also to participate in collective research projects that bring closer the field

30:55of international relations, economic history and history of economic suits. As a teacher, for instance, I would love to bring some kind of economic literacy to students in history or to bring historical knowledge to students in economics. And finally, I would also love to inform public policies from an historical perspective. But of course, we are not in an ideal world. And there are some challenges ahead for such a path. And I see at least three. So of course, job openings in the global context of budget care are quite seldom.

31:34There are some strong disciplinary boundaries between history and economics, which are sometimes hard to bridge this gap. And there is also a strong gap between the French and Anglophone academia, which is less important in economics, but which is quite big in history. So it can be difficult to play in these two different worlds.

32:05So, yes, I would say these are the main challenges. Thank you. What about you, Benjamin? Yeah. Thank you. So I think also I'm facing kind of similar challenges. And the job market in political theory has always been difficult. But in an ideal world, I certainly am hoping to continue in academia and find a tenure track job and turn my dissertation into a book.

32:40And aside from the job market, I think one of the challenges that I'm facing that's also something that I just generally find interesting as well. So it's not just a challenge, but also a curiosity is kind of the odd point where my research hits. Because when I talk to people at various conferences, whether it's in political science or at the Mercatus

33:15Center, all these different places that have been really generative for my work, it's very interesting to bring up the topic of my dissertation and now my book. Uh, because, uh, when I bring up, uh, the Austrian school or the Frankfurt school, um, it's, it's a very divisive topic and, uh, a lot of people fall kind of into three camps. Um, one camp is that they support the Austrian school and have nothing good to say about the

33:50Frankfurt school. Uh, the second, uh, is vice versa that, uh, that they're, uh, really committed to critical theory or critical, critical social theory, um, of the Frankfurt school or at least partial, uh, and find, uh, the Austrian school to be, uh, terrible neoliberals. Um, and then the third position I find kind of, uh, funny, uh, in this position is, is that they actually dislike both. And so they, they really enjoy my project because, uh, because I'm trying to say that

34:24these two groups of scholars are actually more similar, uh, than we give them credit. And so, uh, none of those positions is actually the position that I take, uh, which is actually trying to find common ground and common insights, uh, between the two schools. Um, and so it's kind of similar to, uh, this story that, uh, that one of my professors at UC Irvine, uh, would mention where, uh, he does, uh, mixed methods. And so he does historical analysis, uh, as well as quantitative research and, and he combines

35:01the two approaches and he finds that the, uh, the historians always want him to be more historical and the quantitative, uh, specialists always want him, uh, to be, uh, more quantitative. And so I, I kind of see it similar to that challenge of being interdisciplinary, but in a slightly different way. And so I, I find that to be both, both a challenge and, and a curiosity. Um, and, uh, I'm hoping that that, that, that will be something that ends up being a positive

35:33for, for my research because, uh, people have taken such interest in such varied ways.

35:41Fantastic. I hope this world is closer to an ideal world than a non-ideal world. Um, I have, we have some questions about the research itself that you've shared with us. Uh, so we have a couple of questions for each of you about, um, some papers that you were willing to send our way. And I've got a question for Raphael to start us off. So, uh, Raphael, you sent us a working paper titled UNCTAD, which is a long acronym for United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Experts as an Intellectual Basis for Developing

36:15Countries' Involvement in the Reform of the International Monetary System, 1965 to 1967. So what was this, what was UNCTAD? What was this Conference on Trade and Development? What was the historical backdrop to their activities during, uh, this period of time? And what was at stake in the international monetary reforms that you mentioned in the title of this paper?

36:39Thank you so much for, for this question, Jen. Um, UNCTAD, in my opinion, is really a fascinating topic because in the 1960s, the main work of area of the United Nations became development. And this was, this was the result of the political pressure of an emerging coalition of developing countries from Latin America, Asia, Africa. And as part of this effort, there were a number of organs and agencies of the United Nations that

37:12were created during the decade. UNCTAD was one of them. So at first it was held in Geneva as a unique conference in 1964, and then it was made permanent. As such, UNCTAD served both as a political forum for North-South negotiations, and as an administration that helped developing countries to precise their negotiation platform by providing new economic knowledge. So that its goal was to renegotiate the existing international economic system to

37:47integrate development in its functioning. Indeed, UNCTAD had the very famous secretary general and the person of the Argentinian economist Raúl Prebiche. At that time, Raúl Prebiche was the most famous economist of Latin America. He had already created, as you know, he had already created the Argentinian Central Bank, and he had directed the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America. So UNCTAD was the key figure that drafted a consensus between the very diverse set of

38:18positions of developing countries. And in this context, UNCTAD negotiations targeted a few international organizations. The most well-known target was the GATT, because since the late 1940s, prohibition Latin American countries that challenged the trade system, they had argued that commodity producers suffered from declining terms of trade in their exchanges with industrial countries. And as such, the international division of labor impeded the development of what he called the

38:53periphery of commodity producers. In UNCTAD, the Global South Coalition therefore pushed for a more beneficial commodity trade, and they also obtained some major concessions, including non-reciprocal exchanges with developed countries, which we still hear about today in political debates. But developing countries also used UNCTAD to get their way into the negotiations over the reform of the

39:24international monetary system. As you know, Robert Truffin already diagnosed in the early 1960s the incoming end of the Bretton Woods system,

39:35because the lack of gold production created a liquidity crisis. So that the amount of dollar balances needed to answer this crisis was also threatening the dollar's credibility. At the same time, Truffin estimated that the stabilization of the U.S. balance of payments would provoke a collapse in world trade. So there was really a critical issue in the international monetary system, and to solve it,

40:08a group of 10 developed countries debated the creation of a new international reserve currency that could be issued by the International Monetary Fund, which would give to the IMF the power to control the amount of international liquidity in circulation. At that time, the idea was quite innovative because it would be the first international reserve currency ever created without material backing. But these 10 countries envisioned a dual approach. Basically, this currency would be issued only to them,

40:46while other countries would have to gain it through trade. So the major step made by Prebysh in UNCTAD was to gather a group of experts in 1965. They were mostly economists and central bankers, and they defended the inclusion of developing countries in the creation of this new international reserve currency. Some of these experts are quite well-known. I think about Richard Kahn, Thibault Skitowsky, or Trevor Swann.

41:19Others were at that time not so well-known, but quite influential, like Gamani Korea from Sri Lanka, or IG Patel from India, or also Jorge Gonzalez del Valle from Guatemala. By demonstrating the existence of structural monetary issues among commodity producers, the report established that there was a link to build between development and the international monetary system.

41:54This report had actually quite a large outreach, and it served as a platform for developing countries in international negotiations. It also convinced staffers of the IMF, such as research director Jack Pollack.

42:12And eventually developed countries that to accept the universal distribution of this new asset, which was formally created by the IMF in 1969, as the special growing rights.

42:25Additionally, this was a very important step that also created a change in the funds policies, as the IMF gradually integrated the structural issues of commodity producers in its evaluation of the conditionalities associated with its landings. So, to sum up, UNCTAD and its experts produced new economic knowledge that legitimized the demands of developing countries, and ultimately served their influence in international monetary negotiations.

42:58Thank you very much, Rafael. It's really interesting, and it's really, yeah, this international dimension is really important. And we perhaps sometimes forget that in our own national stories. Given the range of actors in your story that are quite diverse, and they are truly international, and I wonder, with so many different contexts, to consider what challenges this confronts you as a researcher.

43:32Thank you, François. In this paper and in my dissertation, I wanted to study the negotiation processes, which changed the post-war financial and monetary system. But I wanted to do so by de-centering our perspective on it, by including the role and the influence of Global South actors in the picture. So, this included, this complicated a lot of study because I could not focus, like previous historians,

44:03on the hands of diplomats and economists, which were in Europe and in Northern America. So, to get a view on non-self negotiations, I used the archives of multilateral organizations, so the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the World Bank, which are actually quite difficult to study for a set of different reasons. First of all, the language in the international organization is quite dry and quite diplomatic as well.

44:35So, it has a tendency to hide issues rather than to highlight it. Also, the economic debates at stake were quite complex because, on the one hand, UNCTAD and IMF talked together while using very different approaches and concepts. So, but at the same time, they were still maintaining a debate. So, it was quite complicated to make sense of these world discussions. On the other hand, there was also a huge gap between diplomats and economists and in the way they

45:09talked about economic issues and the difficulty between these two kinds of actors to convince one another. Finally, I also studied a coalition with very diverse and sometimes contradicting positions. So, it was here as well difficult to make sense of their common negotiation position. Maybe, if I may add another point, is that there were also another very challenging point in the study

45:44were the misconceptions about the history of development economics. When you open today a book on the development economics, such as the one written by the OECD, and you go to the history section, well, what are the main authors which are cited? It is always Rosenstein-Rodan and Rostow. Of course, Rosenstein-Rodan was so important, but Rostow was quite late in the study of development economics in respect to what was being done in the United Nations already in the 40s and in the 50s.

46:20Similarly, the OECD will often describe Raoul Prébiche as the head of the dependency theory, which he was absolutely not. He is often associated with Marxism when he was not. He was actually... The work of Mauro Boganovsky, for instance, and Margarita Fejardo has shown that he was quite detached from the economists in the Latin American world, which were very much more radical than he was.

46:54So, this is quite complicated to make sense of these debates when coming from the literature. And last point on this misconception about the history of development economics is that

47:09often the global-style economists are seen as uninfluential. And because we take a look at it from a very...

47:21We look at it from... Because these discussions are quite far from us and we don't have a close look at it. But if we do, it is possible to see that global-style economists were quite influential and they were coming mostly from Latin America, from the Indian subcontinent, but also to some extent to Sub-Saharan Africa. And it is quite interesting to study these negotiations, to get a look at these figures, to understand that there are other actors than the ones we generally include in our narratives.

47:56Thank you, Rafael, for the nice presentation of your research, for the details also. Now, let's focus on Benjamin's work a little bit. Benjamin, your work focuses on the Austrian School of Economics and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory as aspects of the legacy of Nazi resistance. Can you tell us a bit about each school, their origin, what makes them unique, and how they are typically perceived?

48:30Also, what, if anything, do they have in common? Because they are very famous schools of thought. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is not an economic school of thought, but you created a wonderful connection between these two schools. Tell us a little bit more, please.

48:56Thank you. Yeah, so there's a lot to say here, so I'll kind of try to provide an outline. I'll start with the Austrian School, which is based in Vienna and founded kind of in the 1980s. I mean, there's a way where schools of thought are often kind of retrospectively attributed, and so a lot of times with these schools for the Austrian School, sorry, for the Frankfurt School, for example,

49:31we're looking kind of backwards, and they didn't call themselves the Frankfurt School. They were back when they were writing and collaborating, and yet today we see them as schools. And so there is kind of this consideration of what is a school, what links a school together, what makes it cohesive. And so the Austrian School, when it was founded by Karl Menger back in the 1880s, this was kind of in a debate with German historical school member Gustav von Schmoller.

50:08And in a review of one of Menger's books, he kind of derisively called him part of this Austrian school, kind of in comparison to the more sort of high class Prussian intellectual establishment. And so the name kind of stuck in the end. And the Austrian school is today a lot more known for Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek as kind of its primary members,

50:44primary movers and shakers of the movement. And ultimately, those are the figures who I focus on, because there's so much here in both schools. And so for a project, even a book-length project, you kind of have to focus on a couple of primary figures. And I think that Hayek and Mises kind of make up some of the core elements of the school. And so what brings the school together is its focus on subjectivism.

51:19You have the marginal revolution, of course, but the Austrian approach was particularly subjectivist, and also their focus on methodological individualism. And more broadly, especially once we get to the 1930s and 40s, the defense of classical liberalism, even, I mean, even in the 20s. And that played a really big role in their contributions to political and economic thought.

51:56And in terms of the ways that they've been sort of understood today, and unfortunately, my interpretation and my argument is that a lot of these figures around

52:12the early 20th century have been kind of taken out of context. And there's been the there have been these sort of intellectual movements

52:24of paleo libertarianism and and conservatives who have claimed Hayek and Mises kind of as as their own and use them as sort of poster children for their own causes. And in fact, if you look at, for example, some of Hayek's writings,

52:49the road to serfdom being probably the most most famous, it's actually quite moderate. And there are actually quite a few things that that would be very compatible, not with sort of alt right causes, but actually with with left wing causes as well. And so I think there's been a certain politicization of the Austrian school. And and I'll talk about the Frankfurt School. There's also been a sort of politicization there as well.

53:20So the Frankfurt School was founded in 1923 after a week long conference amongst some of its founding members. And it it was founded as the the Institute for Social Research. And so kind of only today retrospectively do we look back and call them the Frankfurt School. That's because the Institute for Social Research was housed at the Goethe

53:52University in Frankfurt. And one of the founding members was Karl Grunberg. He was he was the first director and he was actually also an academic advisor early on to Mises. And so that's already one of these interesting sort of connections between the schools. But Grunberg founded this school to try to address some of the the failings of Orthodox Marxism.

54:22So in the late 1910s, there had been various

54:29revolutions and uprisings, you know, Germany, Hungary and Russia. And these these movements didn't end up leading to the sort of global revolution of the proletariat in the way that that Orthodox Marxism had sort of posited. And so there was this sort of radical reckoning where Marxists had to decide our is our practice and our methods the problem or is it the or is it the theory?

55:02And the Frankfurt School essentially said we need to we need to really reconsider Marxist thought. And so once we get to the 1930s, the sort of most famous members, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno become come to the fore and and some of the sort of central ideas start to take shape. And their critiques of of the culture industry and looking at the cultural aspects

55:36of of markets and the economy start to become some of their focus. And broadly, their approach, the thing that that holds the Frankfurt School together is this idea of critical theory and imminent critique. And so for critical theory, something for a theory to be critical, it needs to be explanatory. So it needs to have some sort of descriptive element of describing what is going on.

56:09It needs to be normative in the sense that it's diagnosing some sort of problem and its goal in terms of practice should be emancipation and the elimination of suffering. And so it's bringing together kind of a holistic idea of things. And so it really looks like these schools are very incompatible. And I mean, I believe that that's why there have been so few

56:40people even considering studying the two schools together. Foucault actually did make a reference to some of the similarities between the two in a small note in the birth of biopolitics, but nobody has has really followed up on that.

56:59And so that's what I'm trying to do here in a sense. And I mean, the differences between the two schools and I mean, this is this is going broad strokes, because there are nitty gritty details that I could get into. But essentially, one of the things orienting the two schools is that it spills over into broad 20th century debates is the debate of capitalism versus socialism in a very broad sense.

57:29And so the the liberalism and the Marxism of the 19th century kind of has to be reckoned with by what came to be called neo-Marxists and neo-liberals, essentially. And these these two ideas become very big and they seem very incompatible. There are also differences between the two schools and their views on enlightenment values.

57:59And the Austrian school sometimes has a very triumphalist sort of view of Western civilization and its successes. And the Frankfurt School sometimes seems endlessly negative about the way that that history has progressed. And liberalism and attacks on liberalism from support of liberalism from the Austrians and attacks on liberalism from the Frankfurt School.

58:32So there are broad differences, but there are also really interesting historical parallels. So both of them kind of developed. We have the Goethe University in Frankfurt and the University of Vienna, not 500 miles from each other. Many of these figures participated in in the same classes, for example, the Bomba Verk privat seminar.

59:02And then at the rise of Nazism, both schools actually had quite a few Jewish members on both sides, and all of them were intellectuals. And so they were all persecuted. They all had to flee. Hayek was already in at the LSE at the time. But all the others in the 1930s fled and eventually ended up in the United

59:33States and in various ways contributing to the war efforts. It was actually really interesting and ironic that the members of the Frankfurt School actually helped the CIA and contributed really important studies of Nazi Germany in real time, while at the same time being investigated by the FBI for their potential socialist ties. And so I can get into even more of the connections between the two

1:00:09historically. But in terms of in terms of their actual ideas, it seems like they're very incompatible. But one of the strengths that comes out of it is that they actually both have a strong defense of the rule of law and and even of democracy. There have been some questions over that on both sides, and yet that still rings true, according to my reading. Both of them critiqued historical Marxism,

1:00:42positivism, and historical determinism. Both of them also had critiques of a certain constructivist rationality that it kind of began during the Enlightenment. And Hayek, for example, talks about Cartesian rationalism as as highly problematic. And the Frankfurt School does as well. And so there are certain critiques that they that they hold together as well. What what animates them, though, is, is that

1:01:20both are engaged in a project of liberty and of liberation. Both of them, regardless of of their different methods and different attempts in different ways, are trying to theorize a more free society. And so that's where I kind of try to end up there.

1:01:41I've got a small question about the text that you sent us. So you sent us the introductory chapter of your manuscripts. And in the title of this chapter, and you and you discussed this in the chapter itself, the notions of you mentioned the notions of the road to serfdom and the path to barbarism. And these expressions have really long standing profound connotations in the history of economic and political thought. So this is a little bit of a small question. The text that you sent us actually focuses more on serfdom than barbarism. Is there a reason for that? Or could you tell us a

1:02:15little bit about your reasoning here? Just curious? Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I mean, that's a very, that's a very good question. I find that the metaphor of a road to serfdom and a path to barbarism to just be very potent and a very useful sort of way of mapping political geographies. So the reason that I focus a little bit more on on the road to serfdom, and of course, that was the the title of Hayek's book is because that

1:02:54that was a term that was actually used by by Hayek. And he actually took that from Tocqueville's idea of servitude. And so he was kind of inspired in that sense. And the title was at the very least. And then, and then barbarism is kind of the flip side. So the Frankfurt School talks about

1:03:24barbarism as

1:03:27as the sort of the other side of the coin of enlightenment. And so with enlightenment, we see all of these, these progressive visions, we see all of these technological advances. And yet at the same time, we see increasing alienation, increasing exploitation, and disillusionment with the very institutions of freedom that enlightenment purported to bring. And so that sort of dark side of

1:04:00enlightenment is actually what the Frankfurt School calls barbarism. And so I kind of draw this comparison into the sort of political geography that Hayek is using. Because when Hayek talks about a road to serfdom, he's not talking about a slippery slope. That's, that's kind of a fallacy around around Hayek's thinking. It's not like we have one little intervention in in the economy or one little thing,

1:04:38and all of a sudden we tip into servitude. It doesn't work quite like that. It's his book was more of a warning. And actually, his move from politics, from economics into the political and into the public sphere in writing the book was actually rather tentative. And yet he saw it as

1:05:01as a duty for himself to do to be involved in that sense and to give that warning based on all of the things that he was seeing. And so in, in the sort of debates around the 1940s, I mean, we also have on the Frankfurt School side, a couple of books come out that same year in 1944, as the road to serfdom. We also have the dialectic of Enlightenment, and we have Franz Neumann's Behemoth, and Mises also published the

1:05:39Omnipotent Government. And so we have that kind of as this flashpoint. And I think that I think 1944 is really important and interesting, because at that point, both schools were, of course, thinking about

1:05:57the world's war, but they were also thinking beyond it. They were thinking about the the allies and the other countries that they were worried were going to tip into barbarism and into servitude. And so what brings the sort of road to serfdom and paths to barbarism together is actually this collective worry and collective critique of where Western society was going, even outside of Nazi Germany. And

1:06:30that was not necessarily unique, but certainly defining features of each of the schools. And so I like to use the metaphor of roads and paths, because they also gesture to the common ground upon which these schools were all treading. And I try to use roads as a metaphor, because because they can lead in the same direction, or they can go parallel. And so in a sense,

1:07:03it's not just a metaphor for the dangers that the Austrian Frankfurt School saw in Western society, but also for the project itself, of finding where these roads intersect, where they run parallel, and my focus and hope on on where we can find common ground at perhaps a crossroads between the two. Thanks so much, Benjamin. Ava, we've got a couple of questions for you. I've got a question about your

1:07:37research that you mentioned earlier. It's a continuation of your research that you're doing in your dissertation on basic income. And in the manuscript that you sent us, it was addressing the history of arguments regarding basic income or universal basic income policies. And one of the things that you argue in this paper is that basic income is not a single particular thing. So what I wanted to ask was like, how we should we think about basic income? And in particular, you can contrast your story with that of Vanderborg and Van Parry, who came out with their basic income book in I think 2019.

1:08:13And so I was wondering what their take was, and what makes yours a contrasting story to the one that they're telling. Yeah, thank you so much, Jen, for the question. So actually, yeah, this research comes from my first chapter of my thesis. And the objective was to show the conceptual complexity of basic income. And right now, actually, I'm trying to the hard task of transforming this chapter into an

1:08:43article. But anyway, for the purpose of the thesis, I wanted to show the complexity of the concept, because of course, you have different way of naming basic income, you can talk about unconditional basic income, universal basic income, citizens income, negative income tax, so you have a lot of different names, but you have as well a lot of different objectives. So what I did in this chapter, I tried first to conduct an historical analysis of the idea of on basic income. And for that,

1:09:21I based my analysis on Philippe Van Parry and Yannick Van Derborg's book, where they historicized the concept. And for example, in their work, they really traces a long trajectory of the idea of basic income from really early reflection on land distribution by, for example, Thomas Spence in 1797, through a lot of different proposition to end up with, for example, free man negative income tax with the debate on reducing

1:10:02the role of the role of the states. But they go as well even further in the 80s with the building of the basic income international European network. So yeah, they have like this long trajectory. But recently, we have seen some some critics that emerge on this historization. The critics emerge from people that are contextualist, contextualists, like for example, Sloman, Jäger, Zamora, or Tena Camporosi. And they have argued that the

1:10:37story made by Van Parry and Van Derborg tends to create a kind of myth around basic income that is seen as a timeless ideal of social justice. But they argue that in reality, each proposal is shaped by its historical and social context. And according to them, but don't take that into account. So for example, if we take the proposition of spends, actually, it's strongly linked to the reflection around property rights, and as well, in the context of

1:11:14a productive economy, which is really different, like a productive economy, so which is really different from the contemporary proposal of basic income. So they argue that you can't really make a link. And so with these two layers, we see the complexity, because we have different names, different vision of basic income, then the historicization that is made is pretty has a critique. So what's the income, what's in the history. And so what I wanted to do is in the second time to enrich the story of basic income,

1:11:50with a quantitative approach of the history of basic income, since this, since the 60s, through an analysis of communities, collaboration and topics of work. So we could have a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary trajectory of basic income. And so for that I conducted a bibliometric analysis.

1:12:21So that's an approach that has been recently as well developed in the history of economics, notably by Francois Claveau and Alexandre Truc. And it's in this method that really, you can see the originality of this this chapter of thesis, because it has never been used in the in the history of UBI, so basic income. And so for that to conduct this bibliometrical analysis, we used data from Open Alex. So Open Alex is a open

1:12:58database database, which focus on data on sciences. So it gives us more than 250 millions of data.

1:13:14And so what we did, actually Open Alex already has a concept of basic income. So we use that concept. And then we use a layer of filter that was focusing just on social sciences. So we ended up with like 4000 publications. So publication that are articles that are published, but as working paper, books, and so on. And what we did in the other step was to have a broader

1:13:48database database. So what we did is that we looked for articles that had a key concept, like for example, basic income, citizen income, kind of different names, and we add this, these papers and books into our database. And so we ended up with like 5000 articles articles to study. And so what this allowed us is to have in the end, a static, and a dynamic analysis. And so the static

1:14:23analysis allowed us to identify five main communities. So a community really working on social justice. So in this community, we really see the importance of Philippe van Parij's work that is really central, but we have as well a community that is more focusing on experimentation. So field experiment, a lab experiment, natural experiments, and they're really focusing on what is the behavioral effects of basic income on individuals. Then we have a community that is

1:15:00more focusing on labor supply and taxation. So this community is not really using experiments, but more modelization. And so in this community, we see as well the importance of treatment work. And we have also identified a degrowth community. So a community that is really

1:15:20focusing on ecological concerns, sustainability, and that are linking this concern with basic income. And we identified another group that has several diverse topics. And so we also had a dynamic analysis. And so we tracked the historical and geographical dynamics. And so for example, we have identified three key periods. So between the 60s and the 80s, we have seen that the UX experiment were leading the research on basic income. And then from the

1:15:5480s through 2000, we saw that there was a rising interest in the taxation and labor supplies community, as well as the social justice community, which is not surprising, because it's at this moment that Van Parij started to publish. And we see that from the 2000, we have a diversification of a topic of interest in the basic income research. So overall, I think that this approach highlights the

1:16:27internal tension of basic income, and the plurality of its objective, showing, for example, the differences between Friedman's negative contact that is in one particular community, that aims at reducing the role of the role of the states. And on the other side, Van Parij's proposal, that is more aiming at promoting social justice, and that is as well in a separate community.

1:16:54Thank you very much for these explanations. You use bibliometrics in your paper. Could you tell us a bit about bibliometrics? What sorts of challenges are involved in bibliometric research? Do you have any advice for bibliometricians in the history of economics? And also, did you discover anything surprising in your bibliometric investigation of basic income?

1:17:20Yeah, thank you so much for this question, actually. So I think bibliometric research in the history of economics comes with, of course, specific challenge, and as well, it's kind of new. So, I mean, we still have to learn. But I think one of the major issues is, of course, data availability. I mean, for older research, especially before the 60s, 50s, many books and articles are not properly referenced or digitized, so it's really complicated. In my case, I have the chance to work on a relatively recent

1:17:56topic, like basic income. So, it made it easier to collect data. But the challenges still remain in defining keywords, filtering the corpus, or even interpreting the network meaning fully. So, I mean, bibliometrics is really just a tool because you really need to have the all other knowledge about what is going on with your graphs, with your tendencies. So, maybe one surprising finding from my study

1:18:30was for me, because I wasn't expecting that. But now that I looked a bit more about that, it's not that surprising. But at that moment, I didn't know about that. And I think that, as well, the really richness of a bibliometric studies that you maybe not discover, but at least you look into topics, research that you might have not heard about before. So, for example, in my case, I've seen that there is

1:19:03really a preeminence of South African debates on basic income. And as well, the emergence of ecological concern, of course, I was aware of, but I wasn't realizing that it was becoming such an important thing in the basic income research. Because in my paper, I showed that actually, in 2020, it became the third most studied topic in basic income research. So, I was surprised

1:19:39about that. So, maybe my advice for other people that want to use bibliometrics in the history of economics would be to combine quantitative network analysis with qualitative understanding of the historical context. So, numbers alone cannot capture the intellectual evolutions. They need to be interpreted alongside the ideas, the debates, and the historical circumstances.

1:20:06All right. We've reached the end of our session here. Thank you so much for the three of you for joining us once again for our audience members. These are Ava Jacob, Benjamin Bryson, and Raphael Orange Leroy. Give them jobs, read their work, and until next time, thanks for joining us. Join us again next month for another episode of Smig's and Mark's Walk into a Bar, a History of Economics podcast.